Studies investigating the effect of connectives on comprehension have yielded different results, most likely because of differences in methodology and limited samples of texts and readers. We added and removed causal, temporal, contrastive, and additive connectives in 20 authentic Dutch texts. Dutch adolescents (n = 794) differing in reading…

Canonical coherence occurs when subject matter in school is organized to align with the logical structures of an academic discipline. Even though it is highly desired, this condition is an assumption that must be empirically tested, which was the rationale behind our examination of the coherence of topics from middle-school (grades 7-9) integrated…

Achieving a sufficient IELTS band score for academic purposes has been a major goal of many L2 learners around the world, especially those in Asia. However, IELTS writing scores were consistently reported to be the lowest when compared to the scores in speaking, reading, and listening. Despite a growing body of research in IELTS writing, little…

Summative assessment of students' writing predicts not only the extent to which the course learning objectives have been achieved but also reveals the relevance of the assessment design with the construct of writing being assessed. Any dichotomy between the assessment criteria and the construct of writing or between the assessment criteria and…

Competence in both spoken and written English is very important for all learners regardless of their hearing ability. Previous studies reveal that hearing-impaired learners face several challenges in their written English. These challenges affect their communication, which is likely to affect their education and career aspirations. The thrust of…

While still more common in the sciences, the Thesis by Publication (TBP) is gaining increasing popularity in the social sciences. However, we argue that norms and possibilities around accepted possible structures for this thesis form are still very much emergent, with a paucity of research concentrating on this area. As a consequence, doctoral…

To build a coherent accurate mental representation of a text, readers routinely validate information they read against the preceding text and their background knowledge. It is clear that both sources affect processing, but "when" and "how" they exert their influence remains unclear. To examine the time course and cognitive…

The purpose of this study is to analyse how vocabulary depth develops in the early years of primary school and to ascertain the effect it has on the quality of the texts produced by the students. A total of 332 Spanish students from the first to fourth grades participated by doing a synonyms/antonyms task to evaluate their vocabulary depth, along…

There are a number of functions paragraphs play in discourse studies. For example, it encourages a writer to give adequate focus to the various aspects of his or her message; and it facilitates the identification of one idea in an essay to another idea. Some classical second language writers (for example: Stern, 1976; Halliday & Hasan, 1976;…

Is it structure or the selection of knowledge that makes writing historical narrative so difficult? Where does a conceptual focus on change, or causation, come in? James Ellis set out to explore the challenges his Year 9 pupils faced in writing historical narratives about change. Inspired by the work of Orlando Figes, he put together a scheme of…

This study investigates the relationship between three discourse synthesis skills (i.e., quotation, summarization, and connection) and students' overall integrated writing performance in Chinese, students' first language, and English, their second language. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that 63.6% of the variance in students' overall…

In this paper we outline the use of a concept mapping narrative method to elicit the complex and interconnected conceptualisations of specialized knowledge (assessment literacy) for a specific cohort of participants (teacher-examiners). In particular, we are interested in exploring how relational concept mapping and narrative interviews can be…

This paper provides a critical reflection on the academic writing ability of English second-language students in a South African university. Acquiring proficiency in academic writing is one of the essential skills that students at the tertiary level are expected to acquire. One challenge that has emerged after the outbreak of COVID-19 is that…

The general consensus in second language (L2) acquisition research that instruction facilitates L2 development has been confirmed in a growing number of meta-analyses and research syntheses conducted in an increasingly wide range of L2 areas, including, recently, pronunciation instruction. Yet, little research has been done on the…

This research focuses on the use of lexical cohesion in collection of poems Hujan Bulan Juni. The object of this research is the lexical cohesion includes repetition, synonymy, hyponymy, and collocation. This research approach uses qualitative descriptive. The data in this study are linguistic data in the form of lingual units contained in an…